We are in the four day period of the ACFF, now celebrating it’s 10th Anniversary of presenting conservation and nature support films here in Shepherdstown.

We saw two films this afternoon, but tonight we saw two films accompanied by live discussions and question periods with the filmmakers.

The most interesting to me was Marion Stoddart whose life and career spent saving the Nashua River was so well presented in the short film “The Work of 1000.”

Filmmaker Susan Edwards broached the subject Can one person truly make a difference? This film tells the inspiring story of how a remarkable woman saved a dying river–for herself, for the community and for future generations–and became an environmental hero honored by the United Nations.

Mrs Stoddart, now in her 80s spent decades getting a very polluted river clean… petitioning, demonstrating, approaching manufacturers and politicians directly, and getting her husband and children involved. Her live presentation with the audience was very involving.

Our Nation’s River: A System on Edge was the second film we saw this evening. Ten minutes long and made by Alexandra Cousteau, granddaughter of historic natural filmmaker Jaques Costeau. This piece was particularly meaningful for us, since it is about the Potomac River, the water body that forms our northern border and flows from us down to Washington DC.

Ms, Cousteau answered questions but also presented a discussion panel of professionals from the Nature Conservancy and the Potomac River Foundation.

The House was pretty full at Reynolds Hall, Shepherd University, with a number of standers who wanted to catch everything as well. Among the folks there tonight were most of the officers of Sustainable Shepherdstown (My wife is in that bunch, of course), our current State Delegate John Dolan whose work for us has been spectacular and who is leaving office at the end of the session. Steve Skinner, the Democratic candidate for Delegate who, hopefully, will take John’s place, was there as well. Both men realize the importance the Potomac is to our community. Of course, Republican Candidate Elliot Spitzer was NOT there this evening. Preserving our environment is just not a Republican issue… after all, don’t they all think that Climate Change is a joke?

This is a busy weekend as Elly and her Sustainable Shepherdstown group are

The Goddess of House Cleaning

having a pot luck supper at our house and we have to do a lot of cleaning today and tomorrow morning. This morning I was up early and cleaned the first floor bathroom. After my radio show I’ve been assigned to the living room… much better than the kitchen!

Tonight we have a movie preceded by a dinner with an old friend of ours who is coming into town because she ha a daughter at Shepherd. So we have a weekend that is really filled up and I’m still getting over my recent health problems which I’m likely to be doing for the next couple of months. Ain’t life great.

Jim Hightower just wrote a very interesting column – “The Price of Admission”.

Here’s the beginning:

Gosh, I feel so much safer now that teenage ticket takers at the Regal chain of movie theaters have been directed by corporate chieftains to search the purses of their female customers.

Responding to that horrible mass murder in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater, the Regalites say they’ve begun rummaging through movie-goers’ purses to protect us from…well, from what?

The Dark Knight Rises shooter had an armory of weapons that wouldn’t fit in any purse. And need I point out that he was a he? Yet, Regal’s rummaging is apparently reserved for women, even though practically all mass shootings have been committed by male specimens of our species.

Read the whole column HERE. And thanks to Hightower for making this absurdity visible to us all.

Anyone who has ever seen any of “The Pink Panther” films or “Spartacus” or “The Lady Killers” has seen the wonderful work of Herbert Lom. The Czech-born character actor died Thursday at his home in London at the age of 95. Lom is perhaps best known for his appearances in Blake Edwards’ “Pink Panther” series as the perennially agitated boss of Peter Sellers’ bumbling Inspector Clouseau. But he moved between dramaand comedy with ease.

Lom appeared in more than 100 films, playing a wide variety of roles that covered horror, historical dramas and comedies. He appeared with Sellers in 1955’s “The Ladykillers” ahead of their work together on the “Pink Panther” films. He also did Television character parts in shows like Hawaii Five-0, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and The Detectives, among others.

Lom also wrote two novels, “Enter a Spy: The Double Life of Christopher Marlowe” and “Dr. Guillotin: The Eccentric Exploits of an Early Scientist.”

President Obama’s campaign released a new video made up entirely out-of-context clips of Mitt Romney, intended to show how the Romney campaign’s attack on Obama’s 14 year old “redistribution” comment was unfair. The Romneyites have been releasing Obama’s old statements without including the complete context, thus making him criticizable. If the same thing is done to Romney, the results change the Republican’s entire campaign.

There are two upsetting I got from the news when I turned it on at 6:00 AM and which has made this the start of a very bad day.

1. Attacks at the US Embassies by Islamic terrorists in Egypt and Libya. Our Libyan Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed with three other Americans, at least one was a diplomat. The Egyptian Embassy was breached, the American flag was taken and destroyed and replaced with an Islamic flag.

The provocation for these attacks was apparently an internet post of an amateur video satirizing the Prophet Muhammad. It seems that the Islamic press claimed this as a major Hollywood film done as revenge against Islamists for 9/11.

2. Although the two Presidential campaigns had come to an agreement that there would be no attacking each other on 9/11, Mitt Romney blasted the President and his administration for being “sympathetic” to the embassy attackers – calling Obama’s response to the incidents “disgraceful”. He did this at 10 PM last night defying the agreement between his and Obama’s campaigns.

“Obama sympathizes with attackers in Egypt. Sad and pathetic.”

- Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus

Obama waited to respond until after midnight when the day of remembrance was over. He announced his consolation to the families of the victims and his outrage at the incidents. Then he made everyone aware of his aggravation with Romney’s statement.

“We are shocked that, at a time when the United States of America is confronting the tragic death of one of our diplomatic officers in Libya, Governor Romney would choose to launch a political attack.”

- Obama’s campaign press secretary Ben LaBolt

I would have to agree that I think Romney’s remarks were both unfortunate and representative of his unknowledgable command of foreign policy. That he showed lack of support for his country and its administration at a time of National crisis and at a time in which he had pledged to remain in non-attack mode in his campaign, would make Romney less than reliable as a President.

Michael Clarke Duncan, the tall and massively built actor with the shaved head and deep voice who received an Academy Award nomination for his moving portrayal of a gentle death row inmate in the 1999 prison drama “The Green Mile,” died today at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He had suffered a heart attack in July and did not recover.

Duncan began his Hollywood employment history as a celebrity bodyguard in the mid-1990s. He received his first big acting break playing a member of the drilling team sent into space to blow up an asteroid heading to Earth in the big-budget 1998 movie “Armageddon,” starring Bruce Willis.

But it was “The Green Mile,” starring Tom Hanks as a death row prison guard in a Louisiana penitentiary during the Depression, that thrust the 6-foot-5, 300-plus-pound Duncan into the limelight. He portrayed John Coffey, a gentle giant with supernatural powers who has been sentenced to death for the murder of two young white girls.

Duncan credited acting coach Larry Moss with teaching him “how to dig within myself” for the heavily emotional crying scenes in the movie.

“I’m an emotional person, a very emotional person,” Duncan told the Chicago Tribune in 2000. “All those tears you see in the movie were mine.”

“Realistically, I didn’t think I would win the Oscar, but the nomination was a personal validation for me. It proved to me that I was a good actor. More important, it showed other people that I was a serious actor.”

Duncan later appeared in films such as “The Whole Nine Yards” (2000), “Planet of the Apes” (2001), “The Scorpion King” (2002) and “The Island” (2005). He also did voice work in films and television, including “Brother Bear” (2003) and “Kung Fu Panda” (2008).

For many TV fans, especially old guys like me, Franken is best remembered as Chatsworth Osborne Jr. on “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.” The series, which aired on CBS from 1959 to 1963, starred Dwayne Hickman in the title role of the girl-crazy grocer’s son, whose beatnik friend, Maynard G. Krebs, was played by Bob Denver. Franken joined the series in 1960, replacing the young actor who had played Milton Armitage, the show’s original rich kid: Warren Beatty.

When Hickman appeared at an autograph show with Franken a few years ago, he said:

“Steve told me people were still coming up to him on the street asking for his autograph and calling him Chatsworth.”

Franken, however was a serious actor who worked up to this past year.

Here is Franken playing the drunken waiter in the Peter Sellers comedy, “The Party,” from 1968:

In the 1960s Charlip created a unique form of choreography, which he called “air mail dances”. He would send a set of drawings to a dance company, and the dancers would then order the positions and create transitions and context.

Known for her legendary cackle, Diller was a force in the showbiz world who began her career in 1952 and was catapulted to fame in TV specials alongside Bob Hope in the 1960s.

Diller paved the way for generations of female comedians, notably like Joan Rivers and others, who broke down the image of the American housewife.

Born Phyllis Ada Driver on July 17, 1917, in Lima, Ohio, she was the first of a new breed; deconstructing the suburban housewife and drawing in laughs on the subject of child-bearing and her fictional husband, Fang.

Eccentric in her appearance, it was balanced by a self-deprecating tone that endeared her to all she met.

‘Her lines were so brilliant that all she had to do was stand on the stage and say ‘em and you would have cracked up.’

Then again, maybe Ryan will be the Republican presidential hope if not in name. He does seem to own the party. We will, however, have permanent documentation of Romney’s slip-up, thanks to Think Progress:

She was one of America’s most widely read film critics for more than three decades and a provocative presence in millions of homes as a regular reviewer on the “Today” show… and she died this morning at her home in Manhattan. She was 90.

The composer won every major award in his career, including three Academy Awards, four Emmys, a Tony and three Golden Globes. He composed more than 40 film scores, including “Sophie’s Choice,” `’Ordinary People” and “Take the Money and Run.” He won his third Oscar for his adaptation of Scott Joplin‘s music for “The Sting.” On Broadway, Hamlisch received the Pulitzer Prize for long-running favorite “The Chorus Line” and wrote “The Goodbye Girl” and “Sweet Smell of Success.”

Family spokesman Jason Lee said Hamlisch died Monday after a brief illness. Other details weren’t being released.

Hamlisch had been scheduled to fly to Nashville, Tennessee, this week to see a production of his hit musical “The Nutty Professor.”

It was a pre-recorded skit — directed, of course, by Danny Boyle (the celebrated filmmaker helming the entire ceremony) — Daniel Craig in character as James Bond arrives Buckingham Palace, where he is taken to the Queen… the actual Queen Elizabeth… and her corgis. Private rooms within the residence were shown, a testament to the nation’s commitment to making the evening a special one (Boyle pulled off aan awful lot of amazing things in the overall event.)

Take a look at the video and see how Bond gets the Queen to the Olympic stadium:

Bill Tchakirides

Would you believe that this old man in West Virginia was once a Broadway Producer, or a Commercial Food Photographer, or a Justice of the Peace, or a Font Designer, or even a Director of a major non-profit Arts Program on Cape Cod? Well, he was. Now he spends most of his time posting in the blogosphere and looking for things to do (retirement is a bitch).
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I am a Liberal

"Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act.
What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those things...every one! So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, 'Liberal,' as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won't work, Senator, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor."
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